How to Control the Chaos of a Multi-Product Portfolio
The Product Manager
The episode explores the exponential complexity product leaders face when expanding from a single-product company to a multi-product portfol
Key takeaways
- Moving to multiple products increases complexity exponentially rather than linearly due to go-to-market and internal execution challenges.
- Anneka Gupta emphasizes the need for dedicated product, engineering, and sales teams to achieve 'zero to one' product-market fit.
Main topics
- Multi-product strategy
- Resource allocation
Notable quotes
Having one kid feels like having one. Having two kids feels like having a hundred.
Conclusion
The episode provides actionable frameworks for product leaders to bala
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:01) After my best friend had her second child, she said something I'll never forget. Having one kid feels like having one. Having Speaker 1 (0:07) two kids feels like having a hundred. And I have to say, the Speaker 2 (0:11) episode you're about to hear has a lot of the same energy. Turns out when a single product organization decides to introduce a second product or Speaker 1 (0:18) third or fourth, Speaker 2 (0:19) all the while protecting everything the first one has already earned, the complexity doesn't just double, it compounds. And that's where a lot of product leaders start getting some harsh reality checks. when to place the bet, where to put the resources, and how to know whether you're building towards something transformational Speaker 1 (0:35) or quietly turning away from what's already working. Speaker 2 (0:38) My guest today is Anika Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, where she spent the last five years steering a portfolio that spans data protection, cyber recovery, and identity resilience. Before that, she helped scale LiveRamp from an 11-person startup to a data connectivity powerhouse. And in this conversation, she's sharing the frameworks she actually uses to stack rank products, the real cost of starving your core to fund innovation, and the rubric acquisition that didn't go as Speaker 1 (1:02) planned, but what it unlocked anyway. Let's jump in. Speaker 2 (1:06) Welcome back to the Product Manager Podcast. I am joined today by Annika Gupta. She's the CPO of Rubrik. Thank you so much, Annika, for making some time to talk to us today. Thanks for having me. We'll start the way we always started off. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today as the CPO of such a huge company? Speaker 1 (1:22) I have been Chief Product Officer of Rubrik for coming on five years now. It's gone by very fast. I didn't expect time to fly by this quickly. Before Rubrik, I was at a company in the marketing technology space called LiveRamp for 11 years, from when it was 11-person startup, pre-product market fit. I started as a software engineer, then moved into product management. And by the time I left, I was leading product engineering, security, as well as customer support. So it was an incredible journey, very different than Rubrik's product, but the through line in all of it is data. And that has been central to Rubrik's product and our strategy and our portfolio strategy, as well as... live ramp in the past. I'm Speaker 2 (2:02) glad that you touched on portfolio because we're going to be focusing exactly on that today. Today's episode is going to be focusing on what goes into leading a multi-product portfolio. It's a topic that we have surprisingly not covered on the show before. So to start us off, what makes this specific challenge fundamentally different versus, you know, like having a single product that the whole company is behind? And what do you wish more product leaders understood about this challenge? So Speaker 1 (2:25) I think going from a one product to two product to three product, it doesn't just get twice as complex or three times as complex. It actually gets exponentially more complex to execute on a multi-product strategy. And I think often when you're going about trying to launch your second product or your third product, you have to come back as a product leader to why as a company is now the right time to be launching this next product. And hopefully... That reason is something that is quite existential to the future of the company. Maybe not for this year or next year, but certainly when you're thinking five to 10 years down the line. I think that's commonly misunderstood. A lot of companies might try to go multi-product too early by saying, hey, look, I feel like there's this big opportunity now and we should do this. Not really recognizing that that might be very challenging to execute on and what the trade-offs might incur and whether... at that time in the market and the time in the company, is it the right time to actually go on to the next thing? Of course, choosing what that next thing is is also equally as challenging and complex. But I think the really misunderstood piece of it is that you're not just slapping on something onto your portfolio that's going to add two times the complexity. It can truly be exponential complexity when you talk about how you actually go to market, how do you execute internally, and how do you get your message out externally to customers. really sell multiple products at the same time. Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:51) absolutely. I guess it's almost like a challenge of should we have another child? Like they're talking about the life cycle of something that's going to be with a company, ideally for the rest of its lifespan. Just briefly, I'm just curious because you're framing this as something that could be existential for the company in the future. What does that kind of evaluation process look like? Just in brief, I'm curious, kind of like what are the kinds of questions that have to kind of come across in order to make a decision of that magnitude? So Speaker 1 (4:15) I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. One is more of an inside-out perspective of, as a company, every company is aspiring to be a high-growth company. And being able to set the wheels in motion early enough, understanding what is the TAM of your existing product, how quickly can you really sell it, how quickly can you continue to scale that, and when do you actually need to add in another vector of growth in order for you to hit your growth ambitions. And you have to do that early enough. Because it takes time for a new product to scale. Very rarely do you have an overnight success that is going to be of equivalent scale as your core product in one, two, or even three years. So that foundation has to be laid quite early. There's also an external perspective as well. When you're thinking about, well, what does the market look like? How is the competitive landscape evolving? You know, in the world of AI, of course, that's throwing up a lot of questions about. creating an existential threat to a lot of businesses if they don't adapt or change or add new product lines in. That may be another factor that makes you think, hey, now is the time that I need to launch my next product. Speaker 2 (5:23) There's so many fascinating through lines that we could explore with this topic. So we'll kind of bite things off in smaller pieces, starting with the organizational piece. So when you're managing multiple product pillars, how do you think about cross-functional engagement and dedication for each one? And what does that structure really look like in practice? Speaker 1 (5:39) I think what's really difficult in a multi-product portfolio, especially when you're just starting with your second product, let's say, separate from your core, if you don't have someone waking up every single day and thinking about the success of that product, then you're really setting yourself up for failure because it is very hard to keep two things in your mind at the same time. Oh, I'm trying to execute on something or I'm trying to scale it out. I already have product market fit, hopefully, and I'm hitting the next set of scaling challenges while also taking something that is completely starting from zero and trying to find early product market fit, taking that from zero to one. So I think, like, obviously, there is a point in time where you may not have fully committed to saying, I want to do a second product, where you probably have people within the organization, maybe within the product team and in the engineering team who are doing some early proofs of concept, exploration, user research. That you can do with like some amount of carved out time. But when you have said, hey, I definitely want to go do this, at least like in my experience, having a dedicated product person and then having some level of folks around that person, whether they're dedicated out of the gate or at least like 50 % of their time and energy is going towards this, are focused on this. That is what it's going to take to get it off the ground. And what we've done really well, I think at Rubrik. is often when we're incubating a new product, we set up dedicated product, we set up dedicated engineering, and then we also set up dedicated sales and sales engineering folks that are actually going to go and incubate this product and see where we can take it next to get that zero to one initial product market fit. And that I think is a very powerful combination, especially in B2B enterprise, because often it's not just about building the best technology. in order to deliver a solution to the customer. It's how you sell it. It's what the value proposition is, the positioning around it that's actually going to help make it successful. Speaker 2 (7:36) Okay, so I'm so glad that you talked about allocating resources and teams because something that I'm very interested in is how do we kind of think about resource allocation when we're talking about, you know, we have to be early enough on the ball in order to make sure that we are hitting our revenue goals. on time, but that means that we're going to be allocating resources that won't necessarily be profitable for quite some time while still wanting to make sure that we're taking care of our flagship products. Thinking about, you know, Rubrik obviously is a very well-resourced company, and we might be talking